Monday December 8th Roundup

It’s Monday again, and the snow is not falling on the trees; largely because the city just cut down all the trees to ease the rebuilding of Granville street. Oh, and the rain.

This week we have some cool news about custom built online ads targeted at user behaviors, Google and whether it’s a monopoly, the release of MySQL5.1, and a load of design tips. Enjoy.

• First up in our Internet Marketing category comes from The New York Times. They discuss a web marketing effort to find out what attracts a click. The article discusses a couple of advertisers building automated systems for conversion testing and ad creation which generate customized advertisements on the fly based on data given either from on-page items and behavioral targeting or from metrics pre-gathered by the clients. Really a must-read for anyone into conversion testing.
• Search Engine Journal is talking about keyword cannibalization and how to handle it. This is a common problem that we’ve advised several clients on, and one of the reasons why you should keep an SEO on hand (or just hire us to fill out your SEO Report card).
• The last of our SEO stories for the week is perhaps the biggest, an interview from The AM Law Daily with Sanford Litvack (previously) of Hogan & Hartson. Litvack was to be lead counsel for a government monopoly case against Google following the Google/Yahoo agreement that never materialized. He claims that the monopoly case is why that agreement was never finalized.

• On the 6th MySQL Server 5.1 has gone GA. There is a nice blogpost about the release and what has been going on with the release versions over at The Data Charmer.
• The Technologizer has a Cheat Sheet for the current flock of internet browser betas. If you don’t want to install each and test them out yourself, it’s a nice, if simple, overview of the ups and downs of each.
• A List Apart has a very long and detailed article on educating clients on information architecture (IA).

• Savio.no has a fantastic bit of how-to on tracking Google SearchWiki with Google Analytics.

• One of my favorite blogs, PSDTUTS is talking about interface design principles again. Always a good read.
• A cross-topic post and an issue that I have always felt strongly about: why usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. A succinct and effective article (though the article itself ignores several of the usability guidelines it mentions), though still fairly base level. This one is great for all you one man design/development “teams” out there.

• This weeks miscellaneous links are both from Azarask.in’s Blog. The first is a podcast on the iPhone and on Mobile Firefox. Say Mozilla, when are we getting mobile firefox on our iPhones/Pods?
• Second is about the new homepage for ubiquity. This is interesting less for its novelty and more for the technologies used on the site.